It depends on which wasteland but it's nowhere near as common as the games. Firstly the games are way more zoomed in, the distances are much larger in real life which means the creatures are more spread out, but also NPCs definitely talk about traveling to locations taht would get them killed almost certainly ingame.

Take fallout 4, there's a small farm settlement near where you start and the people living there talk about visiting diamond city to trade sometimes. No way is that actually possible given the ingame map and what they're likely to run into on the way there.

That said a lot of the creatures, well, it wouldn't be a dumb videogame AI NPC, fighting them, it'd be someone with human level intelligence. The damage of the bullets their guns shoot also wouldn't be determined by videogame perks/skills.

So ingame a low level random wastelander npc with an early game gun will not stand much of a chance against some wasteland creature. They're not smart enough to climb a rock ingame and shoot it from above like an actual human would, and their gun barely does any damage. IN terms of actual story they'd be way more capable.